The proposed project is designed to increase our limited knowledge about destructive and constructive interaction processes which occur in marriage. The general objectives are to develop a basic technology for investigating marital communication in the laboratory, and to study the reliability and validity of two relatively new laboratory instruments. The Inventory of Marital Conflicts (IMC) is a task developed at NIMH to elicit disagreement between members of a dyad, and the Marital Interaction Coding System (MICS) was developed at the University of Oregon to allow trained observers to decode from videotape, couples' behavioral patterns of social reinforcement and problem solving. These two instruments will be used in conjunction to investigate couples' patterns of marital communication. One specific objective is to determine whether marital communication about IMC (hypothetical) problems is representative of interaction exhibited during couples' discussion of their own real marital problems. A second objective is to investigate and define certain patterns of marital interaction which appear to be either destructive or constructive to marital relationships. Random samples of married couples will fill out several marriage assessment inventories, and solve real and hypothetical problems under videotape observation. It is predicted that degree of marital distress will correlate with hypothesized destructive patterns of behavior reported by couples in their home environments and those independently observed in the laboratory. A third objective is to investigate the hypothesis that ineffective, deteriorative communication patterns are inherent products of long-term, two person relationships, i.e., a function of degree of intimacy. Videotaped IMC interactions involving married-, friend-, and stranger-dyads will be scored and interpreted using the MICS. Substantiation would help explain why most marital relationships are unsatisfactory. Comprehensive self-report and observational measures will be taken on all subjects. Findings will have direct implications for the understanding and treatment of dysfunctional marriages.